The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

"Yes, so The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a book that I think everybody should read. It’s essentially a series of feminist retellings of fairy tales. The most famous one, I guess, given that it was made into a film, was The Company of Wolves . Angela Carter takes the safety of the fairy tale, and she flips it – so in The Company of Wolves , for example, she plays a lot with the Little Red Riding Hood trope (for want of a better word). It’s fun to see what the meaning of fairy tales is, what the use of them is; and we could argue that the Little Red Riding Hood story is a warning for girls who are coming into puberty of the dangers inherent in men, and in not listening to your matriarchs telling you how to avoid those dangers . Don’t go into the woods on your own. If horrible wolves talk to you, don’t talk back to them. Always be careful when you go into places that you’re not being fooled into getting into bed with a wolf and getting devoured. Angela Carter takes that moral tale, the moral duty of the Little Red Riding Hood story, and flips it – as she does with Bluebeard and a bunch of other recognisable tales. She makes Little Red Riding Hood’s sexuality central to it, and she writes a Little Red Riding Hood who is the danger. It’s her sexuality that the wolf is desperate for, and rather than arguing that this is a problem for Red Riding Hood, she demonstrates that, in fact, it’s a source of enormous power – because she possesses something that these men desire, and all she has to do is manage their desire to get what she wants from the world. And she must find ways to come to terms with her own desires, and with the way the world would seek to limit women’s behaviours. She does a really good job of taking those fantastic fairy tale elements and making them real, by imposing on top of them a second-wave feminist understanding of how to deal with sexuality and with men in general. It was one of those books, again, that I read during a formative period. There’s some theory about being 15… essentially, everything you really, really liked at the age of 15 is so embedded that you never really get over it. There’s the form of her writing, which is incredibly Baroque and dense and interesting, and also her politics, which is a feminist-Marxist approach to the world… And also this playing with real and unreal things, which is just brilliantly done. The Bloody Chamber takes things that you think are comfortable and familiar and warm to a certain extent, and then makes them feverish and bitter; but also under the aegis of that it finds ways to change your understanding of the way the world is. The Bloody Chamber in general is a brilliant book, but if you can’t be bothered to read all of it, then The Company of Wolves is excellent, and very short, and you can see exactly what it is that she does. There’s loads of really good books by Angela Carter – I could have picked any."

"Yes. Angela Carter played a very important role in my life because I was born in 1937, a few years before she was born, and although we didn’t grow up together, we both grew up in a world where sexism was out in the open. There was no critique of the type of sexism that I experienced when I grew up, and I think the same is true for her. And we both experienced what a lot of people called the second wave of feminism in the 20th century. I did not know her writing until I came across The Bloody Chamber , and it struck me as particularly relevant to the ongoing gender struggles. She had a position and perspective on gender and feminism that I thought was much more sophisticated and nuanced than a lot of the other feminist writers of the time. She wrote three or four books during the 1960s and 1970s emphasising that the most important element in feminism was the argument that women should take their destiny into their own hands and gain pleasure out of life. They are strong enough and smart enough to do this. Her position is fully developed in her controversial book The Sadeian Woman . A lot of her tales, such as The Company Of Wolves , show a young girl taking over her destiny. Here the wolf ends up more or less tamed in her lap. She also wrote two children’s stories, which are out of print now. One is called Miss Z, The Dark Young Lady and the other is called The Donkey Prince . These are also two books in which young girls from the working classes assert themselves and are able to resolve difficult problems. For example, in The Donkey Prince there is a peasant girl who enables a prince who was a donkey to attain his goal. Her writing is also exquisite. She has a great command of metaphor, and the writing is very sensuous without being mannered. She has that ironic humour that Hoffmann has, which I think is another reason I like her. They both use irony to suggest alternative ways to think."

"Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber takes me to a turning point in my career, when I reinvented myself as a folklorist, moving from German Studies (though never really leaving it behind) to the study of myths and fairy tales. At that time, the Brothers Grimm were considered off-limits in academia. Studying their philological work was legitimate, but the Children’s Stories and Household Tales were considered unworthy of scholarly attention and analysis. That changed dramatically with the publication of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment . When I followed the advice in that book and started reading fairy tales to my children, I realized we were wrong to trivialize fairy tales. They were in fact complex forms of cultural production, taking us back to a time when adults told stories not just to entertain themselves while carrying out repetitive household chores, but also to pass on wisdom and start conversations about what they valued. Then I discovered Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, writers bent on demystifying fairy tales, looking under the hood, and showing how their stories did not pass on timeless, eternal truths but were culturally inflected, often with values we no longer share with our ancestors. Fairy tales can stay alive only when we hit the refresh button, making them new and relevant. Like Toni Morrison in Tar Baby and Song of Solomon , Angela Carter turned to fairy tales and myths (all action) and recycled them, expanding the cast and the plot while also complicating the characters by giving them backstories and interiority. Suddenly we see inside the minds of Beauty, Red Riding Hood, and Bluebeard’s wife, observing how they react to the predators, villains, and beasts who cross their paths. Angela Carter was wonderfully iconoclastic and subversive, blowing up fairy tales in both senses of the term—destroying the older versions but also tapping into all their melodramatic excesses. I loved Carter’s experimental writing in The Bloody Chamber and how she made us rethink the terms of familiar tales like “Sleeping Beauty.” In my courses on fairy tales, I assign the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, and then we move on to Anne Sexton and Angela Carter. Suddenly the winds pick up, and you can feel the racing energy in the room. Sexton and Carter gave us permission to rethink the familiar, to make things up, to make a story our own. In some years, I’ve offered students the option to write their own versions of the tales. May I brag for a moment about one of my former students, a writer by the name of Soman Chainani, who just published a wonderful volume called Beasts and Beauty ? Or about Tomi Adeyemi, author of Children of Blood and Bone ?"